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This week's excerpt from The Facts About Modern Manufacturing: Manufacturers see workplace safety as an important business tool. Rather than simply a cost of doing business, safety programs reduce costs and contribute to the bottom line. Between 1994 and 2011, the rate of occupational injuries in manufacturing facilities decreased by two-thirds, from just over 12 injuries per 100 workers to only 4. This is a substantially faster rate of improvement than that of the overall private sector. Manufacturing Facts

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Filling vacant jobs in manufacturing is not simply a matter of training more individuals for jobs in the field, according to a report by the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development. The report suggests that finding people who want to work in manufacturing also is a leading challenge. To help address the problem, some manufacturers have arranged workplace tours, so students can see what high-tech manufacturing looks like in today's workplace.

Digital technologies are refining and even remaking certain manufacturing processes. Monitoring systems give workers real-time remote access to machinery. Technological advances have lowered costs and allowed manufacturers to develop new models of fabrication. "The future is not going to be about stretched-out global supply chains connected to a web of distant giant factories," says Michael Idelchik, head of advanced technologies at GE's global research lab. "It's about small, nimble manufacturing operations using highly sophisticated new tools and new materials."

Community colleges, other schools and companies in Michigan are developing crash courses for certain manufacturing skill sets in order to bolster the availability of talent in the state. Most of the classes are noncredit in order to get the students trained and into the workplace as soon as possible.

Important components to attaining sustainable manufacturing include optimizing fossil fuel use, reducing pollution and recycling, writes Jack Rubinger. In order to achieve sustainable manufacturing, you must also promote the practice in the workplace through signs and labels on all containers, equipment and machines, he writes.

Innovation often fails because companies try to emulate successful companies, writes Sohrab Vossoughi. Setting out to become the Apple of your sector is a shortcut to failure, Vossoughi argues, because Apple's successes stem not just from a single product or idea, but also from the corporate culture that gave rise to them. "An Apple-like experience delivered by a company that isn't Apple can't be sustained, because it's not backed up by Apple's culture and resources," he writes.